Slashdot Mirror
Diablo II: Knickknacks Nicked
Various people sent in complaints, and good old Anonymous Coward sent a link to the Diablo II Forums, where all and sundry are complaining that sunspots, or h4xx0rs, or Blizzard's incompetence have made all their hard-earned Diablo II items disappear into the aether from whence they came. Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
Regardless of how Blizzard spends the money you give them for the game, even if they spend it on maintaining their online service, Battle.Net isn't any less "free". The price would not be reduced if Battle.Net were not included. You have paid nothing extra for it - even though your money may be actually be used for it - so from your point of view it has cost you nothing. Blizzard games wouldn't be any cheaper if they did not include Battle.Net play. (Starcraft is now $20 in many places, D2 is $35. They were both released at $45-$55 which is the same price as pretty much any other game on the shelf.)
You can say that Battle.Net was a part of the advertising for Diablo II, but it was never a major component. The game was never promoted via mass advertisement, with the exception of four different print ads I can think of. None of those said anything about Battle.Net except for a line like "compete free over the internet" or "free online play over Battle.Net". This was in small print on a full-page color advertisement. Hardly a central component of the advertising scheme.
Well, seeing as though ALL my equipment was deleted off of several characters (only on the USEast server) and that I both do not trade, nor care about knowing how to dupe (if I did, don't you think it would be "easier" to be lame on the Open realms?), I think I have a fairly decent idea that all my gear was jacked in some nasty DB fault. Unless their dupe-finding-routine includes items you can gamble for, and find on the ground after killing Mephisto entirely too many times. :)
I just love the false sense of hope they give their regular players when they announce that they are taking USEast down to investigate. I mean technically speaking, unless its an issue with a server-side flub pertaining to joining games, most everyone's stuff is gone. You just won't know it until you join a game
Yes, yes it is.
My employer maintains a free chat & game-connection server for a PC product we released 3 years ago.
Besides a small number of users constantly clamoring for expansion packs (despite the original product not selling enough to break even on development costs, which is _only_ OK since a lot of the code rolled over into a next-generation game), any time the server goes down, even for 5 minutes, even if we've telegraphed this outage days in advance, we get deluged by email and voicemail from a handful of people.
Even though the server has had 99.99% uptime the past 3 years (pretty impressive for an NT server), they claim we're "sabotaging" the server, or various other wacko conspiracy theories. They refuse to acknowledge that 99% of their problems are caused by the users having horrible ISPs and antiquated systems with MAJOR driver/configuration problems.
The real fun begins when the building experiences a power outage of such a long duration that the T1 goes down, servers go down, etc. due to the batteries running out of juice. When this happens people online are notified of the situation, given a few minutes to start up games, etc. (once started, games are done peer-to-peer), then the server goes down until power is restored. Want to guess what we hear when the power comes back? Yep. Conspiracy theories. "There was no power outage! You're just trying to screw us!" etc.
It's people like this that make companies shut DOWN free services. If all they're going to do is bitch endlessly, what upside is there for companies to continue the service?
Remember, "Loose lips sink ships."
Same could be said about one's bank account, eh?
I would love to see the face of the Judge that handles this case when those facts are reveiled.
--
Linux O Muerte!
is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
No. But it is odd to be reporting on Battle.net security/stability like it is a rare occurance.
> I lost a character whose name players today
> (and this is 5 years later) still grab whenever
> it comes available.
The game had nothing to do with the fact that "CowboyNeal" is just a popular handle.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
...with a game service that they don't even pay for
Actually, they do pay for it. The game is advertised with battle.net, and many people buy it for that purpose. When you pay your $50, your buying the boxed game, and the right to play on their servers.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I half-agree, but I'm mostly thinking of the expansion when I do so. The game is, to me, a lot of fun, but I don't have to deal with Battle.Net lag - I mostly play on the LAN with my fiancee. On a Mac, I never really had any stability problems or lag problems with Diablo II. Then I got the expansion. The game crashes frequently, we get lag despite being on the LAN and using machines that shouldn't have problems with a game like Diablo II (400MHz G4s), and occasionally the game launches one of the two players into a "no-man's land", presumably where the client and server get out of sync. That last one is fixable with lots of running around until the machines are forced to coordinate with each other again.
We persevere, because the new classes are a lot of fun to play with, but the game is far less stable than Blizzard's previous offerings. All I can do is hope that Blizzard releases a bug fix patch soon.
Naked.
That's an easy fix. Start with an appropriate Google Search, then visit a page like this one, which loads every few seconds an is pretty small. A webcam would work too, if you disable images to save bandwidth.
... people around here complain about Katz articles or really bad moderation here on slashdot?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
This is a disaster - if I can't rely on my Diablo character being safe, then I may as well be spending my quality time on my relationship with my girlfriend or something ;-)
Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
"If you can see it, but it's not there, it's virtual.
If you can't see it, but it is there, it's hidden.
It you can't see it and it isn't there, it's gone."
-- Some old hacker I knew, RIP
Speaking of this, I think this event might have totally screwed over a good friend of mine who was levelling characters up, getting them good EQ and selling them on ebay for $150+ this was practically his Job. In fact, he just finished and put up for bid a level 80 expansion sorcerous with no skill points or stat points used and a crapload of good Sorc EQ. Tons of the good Uniques. If this bug made him lose that EQ he's going to be REALLY pissed....
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Some people don't take that much time at all...
The guy I'm talking about only took 4 days to get that Sorc up to level 80 with all of that EQ. And he'll probably get 400-500$ for it. Not a bad haul for 4 days work. Much better than minimum wage.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I was playing last night the instant this first happened. (~ 11:30pm EST) Was playing, lost con, restarted, joined a game, found BOTH my chars completely stripped of ALL items.
I have NEVER traded for ANY items so don't give me that crap about the people complaining are the ones that had duped items.
If you meant, that Blizzard was running a dupe-checker-deleter and it had a BUG that deleted legit items as well, then that is the more likely story.
To all those others saying "what's the big deal":
Yes, it's JUST a game, but when I invest personal HOURS of fun into a (persistant world*) game, I tend to get a annoyed if the game world isn't persistant -- what's EVEN the point of playing then?! (Ask anyone who has experienced timewarps in UO)
Michael your comment about people complaining about items disapppearing would be more accurate if it mentioned "people complaining about virtual items dissappearing."
* Diablo only has persistant characters, the world is semi-persistant.
How many of these stories will we see when all of our Word documents are online?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The category is probably a bit too large for a new editor to be accepted easily, but the subcategories would make a great place to apply. Even though it is fairly well maintained at this point, none of it has a listed editor. There are three more sites waiting in the unreviewed queue there too.
A developed enough technology is indistinguishable from magic. As Blizzard technology achieved this level recently, it worked like magic. All items magically disappeared. Nobody promised that a mature technology works like good magic ;-)
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
> It's just a game.
Yeah, it's just a game. but some people take their games very seriously. Imagine next year, just before the Superbowl, one of the teams just plain concedes, and stands around drinking Gatoraid and picking flowers or something. Imagine the uproar! Hey, it's only a game, but it would make every newspaper's headline and there'd probably be death threats on the the team.
I don't take games that seriously. I cheated plenty of times playing Diablo with my friends because hey, I bought the game, I deserve to see every cool thing in it, whether I have the skill or time to play it all the way through. But I realize that some people take their games very seriously so I wouldn't play with someone who cared that I was cheating.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I WANT RARE EXE 200+ DMG LIFE LEECH IAS TRADING 3 SOJ'S WHISPER -=31337H@Xor=- I WANT RARE EXE 200+ DMG LIFE LEECH IAS TRADING 3 SOJ'S WHISPER -=31337H@Xor=- I WANT RARE EXE 200+ DMG LIFE LEECH IAS TRADING 3 SOJ'S WHISPER -=31337H@Xor=- I WANT RARE EXE 200+ DMG LIFE LEECH IAS TRADING 3 SOJ'S WHISPER -=31337H@Xor=- I WANT RARE EXE 200+ DMG LIFE LEECH IAS TRADING 3 SOJ'S WHISPER -=31337H@Xor=- - At least not for about a week
Various people sent in complaints, and good old Anonymous Coward sent a link to the Diablo II Forums, where all and sundry are complaining that sunspots, or h4xx0rs, or Blizzard's incompetence have made all their hard-earned Diablo II items disappear into the aether from whence they came. Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
So the next time Hotmail crashes and a bunch of people lose all their e-mail, are you going to post "is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place"?
Isn't it a bit odd that somebody at Slashdot is posting that information isn't "real".
The market chose cheap "free" multi-player game servers over highly reliable but expensive-to-run for-pay services.
The market gets what they paid for, and no sympathy from me.
(my sincere apologies to any Russians out there)
No, you are wrong.
Rich
I found the summiters comment about "things that never really existed in the first place" to be troubling. The money in my bank account doesn't "exist" in any matter-based form, but I'd sure be pissed if it disappeared. As members of a new virtual world, we have to adopt to attitude that information does "exist" and needs to be treated with the same care that physical things do.
The data about the items, and which item belongs to which character is stored in a database. This data was slowly gathered by thousands of people using millions of man-hours (10000 people * 100 hours each = 1 million man/hours).
If this data is definitivly lost millions of man/hours get lost. If people were previously aware that this would happen, all or at least some of this time investment could've been used in other activities (like downloading p0rn or sleeping in front of the TV during another episode of the latest "reality show"), which in light of this data loss, would yielding a better return on investment (more enjoyment per time unit invested)
You know, it's reading things like this that makes the time-honoured phrase "get a life" springs to the forefront of my mind...
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Perhaps they're betting that Blizzard will rollback like before and reimburse items, so the character someone throws away because he/she lost her gear will suddenly be decked out with all the stuff they had before?
-Corvidae
buying all your items on ebay - $9334
:)
spending hours adventuring to get the stuff - $1150 (@ $50/hr billable
spending hours cheating instead - $650
paying some 14 yr old in booze to do it for you - $70
the look on your face when Bliz takes it all away -
PRICELESS
(disclaimer: I don't play these or really any other games)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Like if someone made the numbers in your bank account balance go away?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Why? It's obvious. Some people have far too much money. A distant friend of mine was an early employee at small ISP named in Northern Virginia called AOL. Let's just say that when they IPO'd, she could burn her net worth for heating purposes and still never have to work again. She was one of those people who payed 5 or 10K on eBay for some Ultima-on-line stuff. Why? Because the money to her was nothing, just like spending $.50 on a coke.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Using that logic, Blizzard could release a patch to remove most features from the game. "Hey, it's not like you paid extra for the Barbarian, and we're tired of him forgetting that he's not outside and crapping on the rug, so he's gone." "Hey, it's not like you paid extra for a real villain. Instead, we're just going to put a single, normal skeleton in the last room. Kill him and you win. Diablo himself will instead be busy doing children's parties."
Let's say I really, really want the bow. Let's say it'd take me approximately 60 hours of gameplay to get it. If I make more than $20/hour, it's more cost-effective for me to work and then buy the bow. It may not be as fun and $1200 is a bit steep, but spending a few hundred dollars on something that will bring a comparable amount of enjoyment isn't unreasonable.
Besides, there're some people who'd say that spending $50 on a flat, plastic disc and $1500 on the hardware to use, just so you can move around a little plastic widget and click the buttons on top for hours on end is silly.
1) You have to realize that diablo 2 items, characters, and accounts can be sold on ebay, and other such sites, for cold hard cash... granted, this cash could be virtual... but no more virtual than the use of a credit card.
2) People spend huge amounts of time with this stuff... I was on the low end of the addicts... and there were months were I spent 3 hours / day playing... imagine if you're a teenager, and you spend, literally, 8 hours / day playing a video game with security features to prevent cheating, so everyone knows everything you have is legitimate... then, suddenly, it's completely gone... That hurts...
3) the stuff is just stuff in a video game... but the entertainment value can be there (it's fun to have better stuff, to constantly improve your character (this is the secret to Diablo 2's success))... so if items can make a game more entertaining... then how are they really different from a game, in and of themselves (in that they may exist entirely in the vapor we call the internet... but they still provide tangible mental benefits that people consider worth paying for)... to put a finer point on it... what about expansion packs?
4) observation - others agree with me... I've seen an individual bow going for upwards of $1200 on ebay...
On the bright side, it only took me a few minutes to get a new archer-wench-hireling back up to near my level.
I figured no point in bitching, and if I lose a new set of items if/when blizzard restores everything, oh well. It's just a game.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you've lost your stuff, just go there and buy new equipment...
LFS. Have you built your system today?
This is so true it is sad, and is such an example of the tunnel-vision so many people have. I paid that money for Diablo II: hell, I was even on a local store's waiting list. And you know what ? In the context of the day, I found it to be a shitty game, very little better than its predecessor, which felt like a rip-off given how many years ago Diablo came out. Only the Mac version could even run at 800x600. DO YOU KNOW HOW CRAPPY THAT LOOKS ON A 19" MONITOR ??? The original Diablo was great fun, but this game was just squeezing the family jewels for every last drop of juice.
Not to mention multi-player on battle.net was awful for the first 3 months (I uninstalled the game afterwards I was so frustrated): games crashed all the time, I couldn't get into games when the servers weren't down, Blizzard pretty much kept all its users in the dark about system status, and the game play blew chunks. I feel like an idiot for having fell for the marketing hype, I still feel like an idiot when I again fall for more Blizzard hype when I see the new displays and think about buying the expansion pack (I won't), and I am going to be extremely suspicious and skeptical of Warcraft III (which I also anxiously awaited). Blizzard, you are close to leaving a formerly loyal customer.
What do you mean I can convert them on demand into cash ? You mean I can convert them with Paypal to cash, don't you ? AFAIK, I can't go to the local 7-11 and pay for things with Paypal dollars or credits or whatever they call them. I can't use them to make a down-payment on a house. I can't use them to buy a soda downstairs.
In the example I made up, there was "work" being done (say, IT consulting for some guy I met over the Net, or putting up a web page that somebody thought they wanted to contribute to). For this work I "earned" something - say some Paypal payments. It's arguable that this is similar to some kid who "works" for a year on his computer (albeit playing D2) and "earns" things that are convertible into money (see item sales on Ebay). I f something is convertible into money than it is arguable that something is also "just another shape for money" - and though you are right that this does involve an extra step, this is no different than Paypal.
I don't know. Would it be weird if you reported on a Paypal bug which resulted in some payments getting lost ?
Having said this, I must say I have little sympathy for users who lost stuff. It is a game, after all, and having played MUDs (mostly Isengard) for years, I know too well that the lords of these games frequently purge inventories and such, especially in response to rampant cheating. I remember one time when the game was loaded with high-level characters (including mine), the DMs were going to do a reinstall and they claimed they had to purge all players because (they claimed; I was skeptical) they were doing an upgrade and had no effective way to migrate characters (I believe they had to purge because of cloned items, too). I offered to write some scripts for them to save our characters but they demurred, and I lost a character whose name players today (and this is 5 years later) still grab whenever it comes available.
We all bitched to no end, swearing up and down that we would never come back. But surprises of surprises, almost everyone came back, and 3 weeks later everyone was pretty much back where they were. For my part, I am proud to say I stuck to my guns and pretty much gave up on MUDding.
People have to realize that this is a game, that certain shit will happen in the interests of game play over time, and sometimes for addicts shock-treatment is the only thing that will work. And if stuff like this diminishes player fanaticism just enough that people aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on jacked up characters, or cloned items, this will all be a good thing. Maybe it will help bring a bit of perspective. I know it did for me.
As computer games advance, they allow users to descend into a reality of their choosing and completely immerse themselves within it. Networked RPGs like Ultima Online were the first generation then games like Asheron's Call and progressivlely more advanced games, each involving the user at a deeper level. There are people who spend their lives playing such games. They have become the Dungeons and Dragons of the technology era. Thankfully, we have not heard of kids killing themselves over computer games yet though.
The newest generation of networked RPGs out there go for complete immersion where the player will recieve faes phone calls and emails from game characters, and the games will effectively encroach on everyday life.
In short, no, I'm not suprised that players are upset about the loss of virtual posessions from a game universe (although I can see where the argument could be made that they paid for those posessions and should have tem returned). It's kind of a sad comentary on the human condition though.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Cause, my friend? Here's cause for you: Blizzard are the biggest jackasses in gaming history. There's cause for you.
Their goal is to have new people buy the game, and keep *juuust* on this side of pissing the rest off enough to quit. That is to say, to do as little work as they can get away with. Dedicated and industrious, they are not.
Oh and btw, I've had a great chuckle from the D2SF forums, laughing at all the whiners. I shall now take a refreshing and utterly selfish moment for a little I-told-you-so: I predicted in detail that this sort of thing would happen, well over a month before D2 was even released. This is not news. If you don't want to lose your stupid little items, DON'T PLAY FUCKING REALMS. It's as simple as that.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Looks like Blizz has found out the problem and according to this the disappearing items problem is going to the taken care of. We shall see I suppose.
Ruger
And what is with this stupidity of buying imaginary items on ebay? The idea of the games was not to have the winners be the people that have the most disposable income/least common sense. The winners were supposed to be the people who played the games the most skillfully. It's reminds me of Tanya Harding -- she didn't think she could win in the rink, so she payed someone to break her opponent's knees.
Blizzard has fixed the item loss issues and rolled the realm back to a state captured the previous day, resulting in all items being restored with a loss of under 48 hours of user playtime. See their Battle.Net Status post.
It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for while being too lazy to investigate the cause.
this reminds me of the time when at the launch of the original diablo ii (not the expansion pack that just came out), hundreds of people's characters where hacked into by hacking groups who sought to take over peoples hardcore accounts who were leading the rank ladders and systematically killing them off for show. they'd make webpages showing the deaths and then pass around the urls. remember, hardcore characters die once, and that's it... once you're dead you can't play with that character anymore. it caused such a p.r. snafu that blizzard ended up rolling many people's accounts back to a backup of a few weeks prior once they fixed their security holes. -Super Kermit http://www.christopherwu.net/
-Christopher Wu
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
The entertainment industry is huge and growing by the minute. We all play computer games (please show me a /. reader who don't). So this is defiantly relevant for all of us.
... and as goes for real or not. Do your money in the bank exist or not? Scary, right.
Imagine you bought a computer game to be played online (we see a lot of these now). Then imagine the server didn't work... you purchase would be rendered useless. This includes if the server is only partial in disorder, like in the case of throwing your items away. No matter what entertainment product you use, you really would feel annoyed if it missed a part. Imagine a book, a movie...
And we are talking big bucks. Today I know people who sell/buy items in online games for real money! And this business has come to stay. We need to escape our daily boring work.
Now you may like Diablo II or not (I don't really play it), but you probably would be annoyed if your own personal entertainment product was tampered with.
Saggi
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
By the way, you missed this post where they explain they will repair it.
But if you investigated you would have found in the news that items got lost before the message of battle.net. i.e. here on US-WEST
But battle.net will explain here .....8-) why your "item" was not found.
---------- Damn. I just reacted to a troll. Mod me down for this! At least i could resist to the "Not pay" part.
Probably blizzard nuking all the cloned items that have plagued the game since day one..